Strategic Growth helps companies improve new prospect success by integrating Salesforce and Twilio

Strategic Growth, Inc. offers integration services to small and medium-sized Salesforce.com customers who may be neglected by enterprise-focused Systems Integrators. Founders Brad Miles and Erik Fike, both previous Salesforce.com employees, used their experience to form Strategic Growth, an Austin-based systems integrator in 2007, that creates, integrates, and customizes Salesforce.com integrations. Strategic Growth has been a Twilio Solution Partner for more than two years.

Challenge

When Strategic Growth’s customers ask them to integrate their Salesforce.com instance with voice services, they turn to Twilio. One customer in particular, a social media marketing company, decided to make a break from their voice provider when their annual contract came up for renewal. Not only was their previous service expensive at more than $30,000 per year, but even more concerning, it lacked the flexibility to integrate to their prospecting process. They also found themselves paying for services that they were unlikely to use.

Strategic Growth’s customer needed to market more successfully to new prospects. Understanding that calls from local phone numbers were 50% more likely to be answered, they needed a means of making thousands of calls each day to and from more than 500 area codes. Likewise, they wanted to deliver a personal touch by automatically routing return calls from prospective clients to the salesperson who had contacted them, even if the prospect called the main company number.

Solution

Strategic Growth had previously implemented and customized the social media marketing company’s Salesforce.com operation. The customer later invited them back to finalize the design of new customized calling features, evaluate alternatives, and to implement the final solution. They identified Twilio and two other companies as possible voice service providers. Together, the Strategic Growth and their customer’s teams chose Twilio based on the ease of using the Twilio API and Twilio’s pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Strategic Growth built the following solution for their customer’s salespeople: When a salesperson logs into Salesforce.com and views a new prospect, he is presented with buttons for two options, “Call Phone” or “Call Mobile”. Once the salesperson selects an option, Salesforce.com conducts a query to ensure that number has not been previously dialed for that specific campaign – saving prospects from annoying repeat calls. If a queried prospect has not previously been called, an outbound call from a local area code is automatically placed. Calls are recorded and added to the Salesforce.com record, along with notes made by the salesperson.

Inbound calls from prospects are likewise handled by the Twilio Voice integration. Returned calls are automatically directed to the salesperson’s direct line or extension, even when the prospect calls the company’s main phone number. The integration built by Strategic Growth uses the caller’s caller ID to locate the appropriate Salesforce.com record, identify the account manager, and direct the call to his phone.

Results

The social media marketing company sees success with their integrated voice and CRM solution. New client prospecting has increased since the customized calling features went live. From a financial perspective, their annual phone costs have gone down by more than 50%, even factoring implementation costs; subsequent years’ benefits should be even higher. Twilio’s pay-as-you-go pricing model is the largest contributor to the savings.

Strategic Growth was able to complete the proof-of-concept in just 40 hours, far below what was forecasted with other voice providers. The initial solution was complete within two weeks. Additional features continue to be added at the customer’s request.

Caleb Sidel, VP of Technology at Strategic Growth, admits that “working with the Twilio Helper Library for Salesforce.com was super easy. I’m not sure we could have done this integration with any other company.” Sidel estimates that implementation time was less than half of what it would have been other contact center providers.